Me… not so much.

Now, I DO have a love affair with herbalism/alchemy. I love it. I love having buffed and long-lasting potions/flasks (though I miss when flasks lasted four hours /pout), I know herbs like the back of my hand, and I’ve never felt that this was a difficult profession combo to level.

Everything else though… yeah.

Lunapike was leatherworking/skinning until I got bogged down in the 150-range of leatherworking and dropped it for herbalism and turned her into a pure farming machine. The same exact thing happened to Tamaryn, my druid, except I never picked up a second profession. Eventually I dropped it for mining but got tired of running around Arathi Highlands looking for nodes. Recently I was inspired to make another attempt at leveling leatherworking but I’m stuck again, around 190-ish. I don’t know why it’s such a big stumbling block. It just IS. I’m not going to spend five billion gold on Heavy Leather and I don’t feel like going out and farming it when there are more fun things I could be doing with my time, you know?

Althalor was doing pretty good with Enchanting for a while. Then I started to fail again. I think he’s sitting at 155 or so. At level 60. u_u

I am off to a good start with Tawbree, though. She’s tailoring/enchanting and I think I’m actually managing to keep up thus far. 154 Enchanting/135 Tailoring — not bad for a level 36 character. I think a lot of it is because my leveling strategy with her is “Queue up for LFG, then sit around in Stormwind working on professions until I get a group, rinse and repeat.” And I get a lot of ‘chanting mats doing nothing but instances. Of course, I’ve probably jinxed myself now… hrmm.

A lot of other people say that you shouldn’t worry about professions until later or what-have-you. I dunno, I kind of like them. I think they could be much better implemented/integrated, but they add a fun aspect to the game. And I’m really jealous of people like my department manager who has one of EVERYTHING. Gawsh.

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I apologize I haven’t been writing much in the blog lately. I’ve been doing a lot of non-WoW things lately– mostly writing and drawing. I think my art may actually be improving (instead of stagnating) for the first time in years, so that’s got me excited. Speaking of art, I’ve opened up commissions for things-that-aren’t-just-avatars, so if you always wanted a cutesy Pikestyle full-bodied portrait of your character, head on over to the Commissions Page for info.

And yes, it’s February and I’m still working on my NaNoWriMo novel. (In the middle of the editing/rewriting stage at this point.)

Okay, maybe not forgotten per se, especially with all these achievements and titles all over the place now, but they’re sort of the three we don’t think about often. You know the ones I’m talking about: First Aid, Cooking, and Fishing.

Anyways, I was thinking today about my relationship with them and how it seems to be somewhat interesting. Observe…

First Aid: I love First Aid. I don’t know why. It’s basically the first thing I train on any new character I make and I level it up to max as quick as I can. On any toon. Heck, I have a level 69 full-blown restoration druid and she has a high first aid skill. Perhaps I’m psycho, or perhaps it’s me being smart in a roundabout way because I have a tendency to tote around a full feral set with her and kitty things on my rare excursions outside of instances, and bandaids allow me to stay in form. Regardless, it’s true, my resto druid is also a first aid freak.

I love when you get about halfway through First Aid and you have to go do the Triage quest. At first it was the most frustrating quest in the world but having done it several times by now I’ve learned to really like it. Plus, it makes me all giggly that they call you “Doctor”. I wish Doctor was an actual earnable title. Then I could go around either informing people that it wasn’t Lupus, or freaking out when people ask me to do stuff because “I’m a doctor, not a hunter!” Er… something like that. /cough

Cooking: I have a love/hate relationship with cooking. I like the general idea and the process, but the problem tends to be that cooking mats go for an arm and a leg on the auction house and I’m too lazy to go farm them. In that sense, it’s not at all like First Aid where cloth just sort of comes to you as you go along.

My main, Tawyn, is at a decent enough cooking level– she can make various moderate-level stat food like Wyrm Delight although I don’t really go out of the way to level her cooking. None of my other alts have gotten anywhere near that point; poor Lunapike is still puttering along with the food that restores like 552 of your health and gives you 4 spirit. She did get a Savory Deviate Delight recipe as a random drop when she was but a wee young taureness in the Barrens so she can make that, so that’s at least impressive!

Fishing: I have a confession to make, I actually don’t hate fishing. In fact, I find it rather relaxing if it’s done in conjunction with something else (the other day we had a Standup-Comedy-bot running in the guild Ventrilo and I was fishing while listening to that). However even then I’ve never gone above about 200ish in fishing. Lunapike is my character with that honor for some weird reason, while Tawyn is still floating around 155 or something. I keep telling myself that one of these days I’m going to sit down and powerlevel fishing because I want the minipets you can get, I want to be able to fish up Dalaran coins, and I want to be able to sell all the fish I get, but the fishing leveling process just goes so slowly that it hasn’t happened yet.

Now for a hunter, all of these professions are useful to have at a decent level. First Aid because there are many times when it’s nice to have it as a backup heal, Cooking so you can make your own stat food, and Fishing to power the cooking (and it used to be to feed your pet, as well, but I hardly have to worry about that these days. Though have you noticed that owls can eat fish now? About time, I say. I always wondered why they couldn’t pre-WotLK.) But none are really super-super-mandatory though I’d advice one to at least get First Aid. For me, the secondary professions are really mostly about having another mini-goal to work on while waiting for something else to happen. And because I love having goals in this game, even mini-goals, I’m rather content with that!